Was Wilder’s Offer All Bluff?

With Wilder’s camp insistent that they’d pay Anthony Joshua $50 million to take a unification fight, Eddie Hearn, quite rightly, wanted to see the colour of the money.

Hearn, in an effort to drive a deal closer to being completed, was keen to set up a meeting, with Wilder’s team, in the US.

However, it transpires that a meeting set for Friday, of last week, didn’t go ahead as planned.

Hearn seems reticent that the fight will happen, remarking to the media,

“I think the fight will get made, but don’t listen to the bluff.”

But the Matchroom promoter doesn’t seem too endeared with the manner in which Wilder and his team are going about things, further remarking to the media,

“How can you take these people seriously when all they are interested in doing is talking on social media?

“Deals aren’t made on Instagram, they are made in the boardroom. But they don’t want to see us in the boardroom. Weird.

“I want contracts, I want a meeting – is that too much to ask in a $50m offer?”

“What do they expect me to do? Just say ‘yeah that’s fine, we’ll take that’? They are bluffing and we smoked them out.”

Exactly!

If Wilder and Joshua are to meet in a unification clash it would seem there is an enormous amount of groundwork still to be done before there’s any chance of a water-tight contract being signed by all concerned.